I don’t think Turning a vampire has any effect on those it has Dominated, although giving the Dominated person a new command counts as a move action. So the vampire couldn’t do that while it was being forced to flee. But the range of maintaining an existing Dominate is infinite (so long as you both stay on the same plane of existence) so just making the vampire flee won’t cause it to break.
Would Roy’s popping the vampires with his sword break the domination or can they maintain it in gaseous form?
The difficulty of saving does not depend on the caster’s level in 3.5, only on the level of the spell and the caster’s ability scores (Charisma, in this case). Ordinarily, higher-level casters will use higher-level spells, but since they all get Dominate Person for free, that’s what they’re all using.
V isn’t using a Maximized or Empowered Fireball because e was expecting es enemies to be protected from fire, and so didn’t use any high-level slots on preparing fire spells. E still had a bog-standard Fireball available, because that’s a low-enough level spell slot that e can afford to use one that might or might not be useful.
It’s doubly surprising that Hilgya got swirl-eyed. First of all, a high-level cleric is going to have a great Will save, and so it’s surprising that she’d fail. But second, all the vampires also know that she’d be unlikely to fail, and so shouldn’t have even bothered to try unless they knew that there was nothing more effective that they could do. Both Roy (with a poor base progression, as a fighter) and V (with a lower wisdom) should have been better targets than Hilgya, so it’d make more sense to keep gazing one of them until they failed.
Familiars and animal companions can be targeted by the same spells that ordinarily target their masters, but only when those spells are actually cast by their masters themselves. And Bloodfeast isn’t even an animal companion: Belkar only gets one official companion, and that’s Mr. Scruffy. Bloodfeast is just an ordinary pet: An animal that hangs out with Belkar because he was nice to him and feeds him well.
Hilga has pretty low wisdom, just based on her actions.
I am expecting to see Bloodfeast in the next episode.
She’s crazy, not stupid. Mechanically, she must have a high Wis, because she’s a cleric who casts high-level spells.
By that standard, Durkon must have a low wisdom as well and we know that’s not the case.
What’s the Order’s best move now? Roy keeping up the sword-throwing, while V puts the Dominated allies in a Force Cage?
Note that Mr Scruffy has not been Dominated
Do they get to do gaseous form or does the green effect take them all the way out?
The x’ed-out eyes suggests that they’re gone for good.
Domination isn’t concentration, so in principle, the effect would remain even if the dominating creature were utterly destroyed. Though it’d become largely moot, since there would then be nobody to give the orders.
They’ll also get new saves if they’re given orders that go against their fundamental principles. That’s not a big deal for Belkar (whose fundamental principle is “kill everything”, which is pretty much what he’s going to be ordered to do), but I have a hard time buying that Elan, for instance, would attack his friends lightly. Or attack a mother with a baby.
It should kill vampire spawn out-right: they don’t get the whole, “retreat to your coffin and rest up” thing that full vampires do. But there’s ways around that even for full vampires: sunlight and immersion in running water can kill a vampire completely without giving it a chance to escape. It’s entirely possible that Roy’s sword’s magic gets around that limitation, too. It’s a homebrew effect, so it ultimatly does whatever the GM says it does.
Would Belkar’s using stakes as daggers count for killing vamps too? Or does he still have to do the whole “chop off head and fill with holy wafers” thing?
The order of events in this fight are a little confusing, given it takes a standard action for the vamps to use their Dominate power, and they also casted spells (Greater Dispel and Mass Inflict Serious for Greg, other spells for others.) I guess it can be explained by, “The Order just rolled a bunch of ones and twos,” but I was expecting V to let fly with a few more Disintegrates, given its a favorite of hir, and it targets Fortitude saves, which vamps, and their 0 Con, should be vulnerable to.
Chronos: yeah, V knows the Bat Pack is warded against Fire, but s/he also knows they have DR against cold and electricity. IIRC, we haven’t seen hir use sonic or acid (though now would be a good time to start), so what else are we expecting hir to damage the Pack with? They’re immune to most good crowd control (except Slow), and V can’t Conjure up some help. I’d expect some “stirring dissertations” from V’s finger on the subject (like Greg or what the forums call Poncherella (SP?)), but V isn’t casting Disintegration for whatever reason.
Strike that, sorry. That was a house rule my group’s been playing with for years. Vampire spawn do the whole turn-to-gas thing, same as regular vampires.
There’s something I’ve expected for a long time. Might be about to happen. Spoiler if correct.
At some point, someone will Dominate Belkar, and tell him “Kill your friends.” Belkar will say “no” and stab the caster. This will demonstrate a major stage in his character growth.
A strong blow from Roy. But he’s a little too obsessed with his cool new toy.
It appears that the vampires that Roy impaled are shown turning into gaseous form (bodies poof and you can see the grey smoke). But a vampire in that forced gaseous form can’t do much except attempt to flee to its coffin. Since these vampires don’t have coffins, they’ll permanently die in two hours. I would guess that a vampire in gaseous form can still issues commands to a Dominated person (it still has presence of mind and the commands are telepathic) but it can’t (re-)Dominate anyone else since it now lacks a gaze attack.
In other news, V looks like they took a bit of damage from falling six feet, going from unblemished to multiple wound marks by hitting the floor after Fly was dispelled. I thought maybe the damage absorbed by the Stoneskin took effect after it was dispelled or something but nothing in the spell’s description would suggest that.
He wouldn’t be. The “share spell” ability of familiars and animal companions only takes effect if the animal’s owner casts the spell and consciously wills it to affect the animal. And it only works on spells, not spell-like effects. So the Dominate Person gaze effect fails on both grounds: Belkar didn’t cast it and it’s not a true spell. And, as mentioned, they can’t Dominate him directly since he’s a cat.
Doesn’t the gaseous form usually have evil vampire eyes? When Malack died, he turned into smoke too, but he was permanently dead, wasn’t he?
Well, Malack literally caught on fire from the sun. When Roy & Co kill a bunch of the spawn on their way to Durkon, you see a single pane of the “smoke with eyes”. Given that they’re killing them the same way now (Roy’s sword, fire, etc) it’s reasonable to assume that these vampires are also being forced into gaseous form and Burlew just didn’t make a point of explicitly showing it.
Also, there’s only a few ways of permanently killing a vampire. Exposure to the sun (Malack) is one of them. The Order wasn’t making a point of using any of the standard perma-death methods so, absent evidence to the contrary, I’d assume they’re not permanently dead yet. But they will be since they have to return to their coffin to regenerate from gaseous form within two hours – but none of them have coffins.